Tuesday, 29 May 2012

Eat Healthy - part 1 (WHAT IS WHAT)

One of the big missions in my internship, has been making an athlete to start eating healthily. He doesn't have any one specific problem or area of difficulty, rather he's just doing it all wrong - skipping breakfast, having a couple of high-calorie-low-everything-else-meals a day, then skipping more meals not to gain weight..and that was just the beginning. Not because he wouldn't care, just because he just didnt know what is he doing wrong and even more important - what could he be doing instead and why.
To help him I made it all very basic and easy and wrote it all down. Now I figured that why not, in a modified form, publish them here, so they possibly and hopefully could help someone else as well. I'm sorry that in some parts the documents are in Danglish, but hope you'll all still get the meaning.
So - part 1:

The Basics - What is what

Energy is measured in calories (kcal). Calories are in the food you eat, and you burn calories by everything you do – sleeping, breathing, eating, moving etc. The more intense the activity the more calories you burn. So strength training burns more calories than just walking, but less than for example running and biking.  

If you don’t want to gain weight, you have to eat the same amount or fewer calories in a day. If you want to gain weight, you have to eat more than you use.
Calories in food come from three groups of foods: protein, fat and carbohydrates. In addition food has vitamins and minerals, but they are very small and don’t give any extra calories.
1 gram of carbohydrates gives you 4kcal
1 gram of protein gives you 4kcal
1 gram of alcohol gives you 7 kcal
1 gram of fat gives you 9kcal
An average diet should include
55-60% carbohydrates=1695 kcal=424g
15-20% protein = 520kcal=198g
25-30% fat =949kcal=105g
ever day.

Body uses protein mainly to build muscles. Extra protein in diet (protein you eat, but what body doesn’t need) will be peed out. (A little will be also stored as fat)
Good sources of PROTEIN are:
meat
fish
nuts and seeds
beans/ legumes
milk products – milk, koleskal, kaernemaelk, yoghurt, cheese, hytteost, etc
eggs
supplements

Body uses carbohydrates to get energy. Extra carbohydrates in diet will be stored as fat.
Good sources of CARBOHYDRATES are:
pasta,
rice,
potatoes,
bread,
vegetables,
fruits,
berries,
juices,
bars like raw-bite, mueslibars
grains – havegryn, muesli, cereal
supplements

There’s also a lot of carbohydrates in
Candy, chocolate, cookies, sodas, ice-cream, fast food; but there’s not much your body can do with those carbohydrates (because they don’t have much vitamins and minerals and calories mainly come from sugar), so most of it will be stored as fat.

There is two types of fats. Unsaturated and saturated fat. Unsaturated fats are good and they’re used by body as motor oil is used in cars – to keep things (like your joints and ligaments in knees, elbows etc) running smoothly.
It also gives you pretty hair, skin and nails ;). And is very important because some vitamins are fat-soluble – can only be used when they are dissolved in fat. For example if you eat a lot of carrots and get a lot of vitamin A from that, but eat no fat, then body can’t use the vitamin A.
Most of the saturated fat you eat is just stored as fat.

Good sources of UNSATURATED FATS are:
fish,
nuts and seeds,
rye bread with seeds,
liquid oils – olive oil, flax-seed oil etc

There is a lot of SATURATED FAT in:
butter,
cookies,
dressings,
sauces
fatty meat (bacon, red meats, sausages, some hams),
high-fat cheese and other milk products (ice cream)
(white bread)

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